Apple event to focus on reinventing content, not tablets

The teaser for Apple's press event, "Come see our latest creation," has a double meaning. Content creators, not gadget freaks, will be the biggest target of Apple's Wednesday press conference.

Although most of the speculation has centred on a tablet device that will likely be announced at the event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs probably has bigger plans in mind.

Apple's goal is to offer a new platform for content creators to reinvent books, magazines and online content, in addition to offering a new avenue for content producers to make money. That platform is likely to be far broader than just a tablet device, and will extend to every device or computer that iTunes touches.

HTML5 and iTunes will form the centrepieces of Apple's new content strategy. The new iTunes content will not be packaged as apps sold through the App Store, though Apple will probably provide a tablet app for displaying new content created with this new platform, and developers will still be free to create apps. Instead, HTML content will be presented similar to the way iTunes currently presents enhanced music and video content.

"The focus is going to be on content creation and participation," a technologist with close ties to Apple told Wired. "If the tablet is going to be an answer to things like the Kindle, which are purely about consumption, what you're going to see is Apple is going to be full-blown about creation."

Our source said he inferred the arrival of an HTML5-and-iTunes book platform based on a combination of knowledge from Apple and his own analysis of news reports.

By creating a business platform for content producers, Apple would be recycling a winning strategy for its iPhone's App Store: the genius of crowd sourcing. Apple opened up a software development kit to third-party developers to code for the iPhone and sell their apps through the iTunes App Store. The result? 100,000 apps and counting, a lucrative industry worth over $1 billion, and a 30 percent cut for Apple with each sale.

Apple has sold more than six billion songs through iTunes, and the software comes bundled with all new Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard computers. That means publishers who sell through iTunes have access to an enormous potential market.

Already, iTunes LP utilizes HTML5 and JavaScript code to present richer album experiences that can include cover art, liner notes, lyrics and more, in addition to music. iTunes Extras works in a similar way with movies. Both take advantage of a browser built in to the iTunes application to present multimedia content.

An iTunes book involving HTML5 would be a logical extension of the platform to create similar rich-media wrappers for e-books and e-magazines. But why stop at the covers?

It could also change classroom learning. Textbook material could incorporate multimedia and social networking elements as easily as any web page currently can.

(Fans of Adobe and its Flash platform are likely to be disappointed, since Apple's support for Flash has been anemic at best, and is nonexistent in iTunes LP and iTunes Extras.)

Then, instead of deploying that content on a website and asking for donations or trying to sell ads, creators could deploy their web pages-cum-ebooks to the iTunes store, where a built-in retail apparatus takes care of collecting payments as small as $1 (59p) while Apple holds on to what looks like a reasonably small 30-percent cut.

A recent Wall Street Journal story suggests that Apple is in last-minute negotiations with book publishers, urging them to adopt a model where most books are priced at $13 (£8) or $15 (£9), instead of the $10 (£6) that prevails on Amazon's Kindle ebook store.

By distributing through iTunes, creators would have access to users on any of Apple's platforms, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, MacBooks, desktop PCs, or possibly even the Apple TV. Even more significantly, iTunes users on Windows PCs would also be part of the available market.

And sure, that content will no doubt look good on a tablet, too. Our guess is the tablet will have exclusive functions for displaying iTunes book content in a special way, which will be one of the gadget's main selling points (among other new, yet-to-be-known features, of course).

In one fell swoop, a move like this would give content creators easy-to-use and powerful tools for creating interactive content, and give them a way of making a living from it, too.